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Up until the room service cart was trundled into our room at Boston’s Fairmont Copley Plaza a few years ago, my then six-year-old’s only exposure to Boston Cream had been the filling of a chain-store donut.

And despite my having gone to school in the area, I too only knew of Boston Cream in this way until the waiter whisked away the silver dome to reveal an impossibly tall and flamboyant slice of Boston Cream Pie, which my daughter and I shared to the last bite (my younger daughter, alas, had fallen asleep five minutes before the food arrived).

In Nancy’s Cape Cod vacation overview, she made the point that when it comes to water, you have choices: relatively warm bays as well as friskier beaches. My family has enjoyed both, sometimes during a single morning. The bays, as Nancy suggests, won’t freeze your toes off.

And once everyone gets time in the water you can head to a beach and seashell hunt without feeling like you’re depriving anyone if the ocean’s too chilly for a swim. But here’s the thing …

I shudder to think how many years ago it was that I took my first standardized test, but I recall the first question like it was yesterday: “A zoo without animals is like a library without _____.”

I run this one by my kids every now and then to see if I can divert their attention from the television. After they shout out “Books! Give us another one!” I sometimes wonder how they’d respond if the second half of that question was “like Walt Disney World without _____,” because in my family, at least, “rides” has not always been the knee-jerk answer.

You really don’t know what it means to get wistful about a destination until you’ve come home from Hawaii. You’ll try to put your finger on what’s triggering such an emotional response, recalling the islands’ perfect amalgam of beauty and warmth and kindness, but that’s only part of it.

Why you’ll yearn is so intangible, in a way almost private, that you’ll end up telling those who’ve never been that they just have to be there to know. The votes have been in for a long time. Hawaii is paradise.